Liberty Alliance Launches Certification Program for Liberty-Interoperable Products and Services

The Liberty Alliance Project announced a new program today that will validate products and services, which have successfully implemented the Liberty Alliance standards for federated network identity. The new certification program will help vendors, integrators and implementers ensure interoperability between Liberty-enabled solutions.

This program, managed by the Liberty Alliance, will also drive overall buyer confidence in interoperability, help predict product functionality and provide a third-party reference point for both technology vendor and implementer expectations.

"Businesses, governments and other organizations want solutions based on open, mature industry standards that will cut integration costs and guarantee the long-term viability of their investment," said Michael Barrett, president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board and vice president of Internet strategy at American Express. "Standards are often open to interpretation which can harm confidence in complete interoperability. With the growing maturity and adoption of the Alliance's specifications, our work needs to focus now on alleviating the business complexity of implementing identity federation."

The Liberty Alliance interoperability certification program awards usage of the Liberty Alliance interoperability logo to products and services that have conformed with a stated version of the Liberty specifications. The vendors declaring conformance must participate in a Liberty-sponsored interoperability event, following published guidelines to prove compatibility with other Liberty-enabled products and compliance with the Liberty standard. The program is open to both members and non-members.

Liberty Alliance's specifications and associated implementation guidelines offer specific features that enable organizations to build more efficient, secure and trusted identity-based web services. The ability to deploy an environment that promotes confidence and trust with employees, partners and customers will help advance the promise of single sign-on and web services.

"We've seen a growing demand from a wide variety of vertical markets express interest in Liberty conformance," said Roger Sullivan, president and CEO of Phaos Technologies and chair of the Liberty Alliance certification sub-team. "We believe the ability to demonstrate proven support for the Liberty standard will be important to potential buyers and users."

"Global businesses are faced with increasing demand to more securely manage multiple products and systems as the number of users accessing Web applications grows," said Ray Wagner, research director, Gartner Inc. "Standards initiatives that promote cross-vendor interoperability have a strong potential to enable implementers to lower overall costs and more fully realize the opportunity of Web services. The creation of standards-based products may benefit vendors as well by promoting trust and confidence among potential buyers and partners."

The Liberty Alliance will hold its first interoperability certification event in Madrid, Spain from November 11-14, 2003. Space for the initial event is limited. Additional events are planned on a regular basis. Interested parties should contact Liberty Alliance at info@projectliberty.org for more information.

About the Liberty Alliance Project

The Liberty Alliance Project (www.projectliberty.org) is an alliance of more than 160 companies, non-profit and government organizations from around the globe. The consortium is committed to developing an open standard for federated network identity that supports all current and emerging network devices. Federated identity offers businesses, governments, employees and consumers a more convenient and secure way to control identity information in today's digital economy, and is a key component in driving the use of e-commerce, personalized data services, as well as web-based services. Membership is open to all commercial and non-commercial organizations.

If you are interested in seeing the full list of Liberty Alliance members or are interested in becoming a member, please visit us at www.projectliberty.org

[Note: The Liberty Alliance Conformance Expert Group (CEG) was formed to define and manage the process for validating interoperability between vendors' implementations of the Liberty Alliance standards. The CEG encourages all product providers to participate, validates their implementations, and publicizes their success. The growing number of interoperable implementations ensure overall buyer confidence in interoperability, help predict product functionality and provide a reference point for both technology vendor and deployer expectations. The CEG defines the testing process and procedures, defines licensing requirements and monitors usage of Liberty conformance logos, and conducts conformance testing events. Members participate in order to (1) define the technical requirements for conformance testing and (2) manage the Liberty Conformance Testing program..."]